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If politics feels scripted and outcomes never change, there is a reason.
I write long-form investigations on power, media, and civil liberties.
thehoneybadgerjournal.substack.com
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Christopher Rixman
2.6K posts
Christopher Rixman
@ChristoRixman
Independent newsletter analyzing civil liberties, media power, propaganda, and U.S. foreign policy.
Denver, Colorado Katılım Haziran 2025
160 Takip Edilen177 Takipçiler
@DavidMorri84575 @iNaomiAllen Who cares what you think ?
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@ChristoRixman @iNaomiAllen Not a good enough reason for me, but you do you. Protecting Israeli citizens should be prioritized over international pr.
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It’s always fascinating how “700,000 people expelled from their homes” magically becomes “they moved 20 miles” the second Palestinians are involved.
Imagine describing any other mass displacement in history like a casual apartment transfer.
The argument only works if you strip the humans out of it first.
Joel Berry@JoelWBerry
You mean the time Islamists tried to slaughter all the Jews again and as punishment they had to move about 20 miles to a new location?
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@ChristoRixman @iNaomiAllen There is no right to reparations for palestinians. And why should there be?
Arabs attacked Jews, now their descendants get money from Jews.
What does Israel gain by agreeing to this? What would America and the free world gain by promoting this?
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@haim_2010 @iNaomiAllen “Sure, whatever you say” is what people type when their argument dies but their ego refuses to.
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@ChristoRixman @iNaomiAllen Sure, whatever you say.
No need to argue with someone who already knows everything.
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You don’t have to agree with Thomas Massie on everything to notice what actually triggers establishment panic:
He votes against Section 702 surveillance expansion.
Against trillion-dollar omnibus bills nobody reads.
Against endless foreign intervention consensus.
Against emergency-power creep.
Against blank-check executive authority.
Washington can tolerate performative opposition.
What it hates are people willing to slow the machine down procedurally.
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It’s hilarious how little anyone gives a shit about this type of pearl clutching anymore
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“The confidence level is honestly impressive” says the guy trying to argue the Nakba didn’t happen while Israeli historians themselves documented expulsions, destroyed villages, and mass displacement decades ago.
At some point this stops being “historical debate” and starts looking like a hostage situation involving your last surviving brain cell.
“Nothing happened, and if it did, they deserved it, and if they didn’t, it was only 20 miles” is genuinely one of the most galaxy-brained moral evasions on the internet.
The funniest part is pretending the entire world hasn’t already watched this rhetorical sequence happen in real time for years now.
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“The confidence level is honestly impressive for someone arguing against both history and reality at the same time.
It’s like watching someone try to win a debate by unplugging their own frontal lobe and calling it geopolitical analysis.”
lol this would be funny if it weren’t tragic
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“The Israelis did expel some people.”
Yeah. “Some.”
Around 700,000 people.
Destroyed villages.
Permanent refugees.
Confiscated homes and land.
Generations unable to return.
But watch how casually mass displacement gets linguistically minimized the second Palestinians are involved.
If another population lost hundreds of towns and produced millions of refugees, nobody would describe it like a minor housing dispute.
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@jbrandimore @ChristoRixman The Israelis did expel some people, but they had taken up arms with the foreign Arab armies.
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“It was tragic, but war is messy” somehow always translates into:
no right of return,
no reparations,
no accountability,
no restitution for confiscated homes or land,
and endless outrage if the victims even continue talking about it generations later.
That’s what people are reacting to.
Not just the displacement itself, but the expectation that Palestinians are morally required to silently absorb permanent dispossession forever while everyone else calls it “complicated.”
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@ChristoRixman @iNaomiAllen Ethnic cleansing is tragic but it happens in war. What people need to realize is that "ethnic cleansing sad" isn't some slam dunk argument for Islamic conquest or terrorism.
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One of the strangest things about Israel discourse is how fast:
“ethnic cleansing is tragic”
turns into:
“you support terrorism” or “you hate Jews.”
Eli Lake literally responded to discussion of Palestinian ethnic cleansing with: “Sorry/not sorry your population was expelled.”
Healthy historical narratives usually don’t require this much panic to survive scrutiny.
thehoneybadgerjournal.substack.com/p/the-wretched…
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One of the funniest things about modern politics is watching every faction claim their policies were secretly wildly popular while simultaneously insisting voters were too stupid, manipulated, racist, uninformed, propagandized, or immature to reward them electorally.
Apparently every governing class in the West is governing brilliantly right before getting obliterated in approval ratings.
Quite a mystery.
Neera Tanden🌻@neeratanden
@matthewstoller The policies in my purview were pretty damn popular. Medicare drug negotiation and doubling health coverage in the ACA had 80% public support. Amongst the most popular things we did. I am proud of the work I did for Pres Biden. Now feel free to share what you've accomplished
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Miriam Adelson gets asked how wealthy political donors exercise influence over U.S. politicians and her response isn’t:
“That’s false.”
It’s:
“Can you allow me not to answer? … I want to be truthful and there are so many things I don't want to talk about.”
Modern political influence rarely looks like movie-style corruption anymore.
It looks like legalized dependency: campaign money, primary threats, media pressure, lobbying networks, and donor ecosystems powerful enough to politically reward loyalty or punish dissent.
Chris Menahan 🇺🇸@infolibnews
Israeli-American Council to Zionist billionaire Miriam Adelson: How do you buy and exercise influence over politicians in the US? Adelson: "Can you allow me not to answer? ... I want to be truthful and there are so many things I don't want to talk about."
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The interesting shift here isn’t lobbying itself. Every major interest group lobbies Washington.
It’s hearing criticism of a foreign government increasingly framed as an “existential threat” inside American politics while U.S. politicians openly coordinate messaging and electoral strategy around it.
That’s the kind of thing that makes ordinary Americans start wondering whether this is still normal policy advocacy… or something much deeper about how political boundaries are managed.
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Here's the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition telling a Chabad gathering that he has spent "a lot of time" talking to Benjamin Netanyahu about the "existential threat" of the Israel-critical right.
"If we lose the [GOP], Israel has nobody."
Chris Menahan 🇺🇸@infolibnews
Q: You said this election is a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress. Massie: "The RJC, AIPAC, Miriam Adelson, and Paul Singer are all part of the Israeli Lobby—and that's where all the money comes from [for Ed Gallrein]." "AIPAC has dumped another $3M into my race this weekend..."
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The revealing part isn’t that AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition lobby Washington.
Every major interest group lobbies Washington.
The revealing part is hearing the head of the RJC describe the “Israel-critical right” as an “existential threat” while openly discussing conversations with Netanyahu about American politics.
That’s the kind of moment that makes ordinary Americans start asking where advocacy ends and ideological management begins.
Chris Menahan 🇺🇸@infolibnews
Here's the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition telling a Chabad gathering that he has spent "a lot of time" talking to Benjamin Netanyahu about the "existential threat" of the Israel-critical right. "If we lose the [GOP], Israel has nobody."
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One of the reasons institutional trust keeps collapsing is because every expansion of executive power somehow becomes “despotism” only when the other faction controls it.
Mass surveillance.
Foreign wars without meaningful congressional restraint.
Emergency powers.
Censorship pressure campaigns.
Domestic intelligence expansion.
Most of that infrastructure was bipartisan long before Trump.
The real danger is a political culture that keeps normalizing concentrated power whenever “their side” is holding it.
Bill Kristol@BillKristol
“What Democrats need to understand is that this is a moment of drastic, monumental change, initiated by a Republican Party poisoned by illiberalism and anti-democratic resentments and a figure in Trump who wants to arrogate despotic powers to himself.” liberalcurrents.com/democrats-need…
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One of the strangest propaganda reversals of the last few years is watching people argue that opposing mass civilian destruction, starvation warnings, flattened neighborhoods, and endless footage of dead children is somehow the “safe conformist position.”
That only makes sense if someone still thinks public opinion is frozen in 2004.
The reason the narrative is shifting globally isn’t because people were “brainwashed by Hamas.”
It’s because millions of people watched this war unfold in real time without institutional filters deciding what they were allowed to emotionally process.
Eli Lake@EliLake
Yes. Slandering the world’s only Jewish state is an act of conformity. It’s much ballsier to tell the truth about the war Hamas started against Israel.
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@FactApparatchik @EliLake "I don't care what the world thinks of Israel" is the only comeback anyone could muster as that country loses legitimacy in real time after committing genocide.
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@ChristoRixman @EliLake lol. that's not any kind of proof that palestinians are anything.
I don't care what the world thinks of Israel. Most people are idiots and they will be reminded what Islam is every Christmas with the fresh round of market truck attacks.
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One of the wildest things about arguing with hardline Israel defenders (Think @EliLake ) online is watching how fast the conversation escalates from:
“the Nakba is complicated”
to:
“Palestinians weren’t real,”
“they deserved displacement,”
“you support genocide,”
and eventually:
“any acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering is antisemitism.”
At some point people should ask themselves why a historical narrative supposedly strong enough to morally justify state formation requires this much panic, emotional blackmail, censorship reflexes, and ideological policing to defend it.
Healthy historical narratives usually survive scrutiny without melting down into hysteria.
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Notice how the question was:
“What has Israel done to earn the title ‘greatest ally’?”
And the answer was not intelligence sharing, treaty obligations, battlefield support, or material benefit to Americans.
It was: “Jew hate.”
Impressive.
Caitlin Johnstone@caitoz
A viral tweet asked "How exactly is Israel our greatest ally? Specifically, what have they done to earn that title?" Nobody could provide a good answer and this is the top comment:
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“Retribution politics is a cancer” says a longtime Democratic operative defending a party that spent years funding preferred primary challengers, blacklisting dissenters, coordinating donor pressure campaigns, and treating ideological deviation like a disciplinary offense.
Washington partisans always discover the dangers of political retaliation the exact moment it starts happening to their faction instead of for it.
A truly astonishing breakthrough in selective moral awareness.
Neera Tanden🌻@neeratanden
People like to both sides the parties, but no Democratic President has endorsed a primary opponent for a sitting Dem senator, even for senators that voted against them regularly. Retribution politics is a cancer.
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@FactApparatchik @EliLake Touching story.
Now try it again without the fabrications lies and pretending millions of Palestinians all share one genocidal hive mind or that an entire population’s suffering stops mattering the second you can attach the word “terrorism” to them.
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@ChristoRixman @EliLake "never again" means more than "be nice to muslims"
It means jews specifically will never allow
themselves to be genocided.
palestinians want to kill all jews. That is taught generationally. It's
their religion.
Jews never responded in kind.
They could but they don't
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